ISSN 1440-9828
                                               October 2006
                                                                                   No 303

 

Filthy Jewish Lies about Iran

Dr. Patrick H. McNally - patrick@fps.chuo-u.ac.jp
Deholyhoaxotoxifier and anti-Semitist [not anti-Semite]

Elite Jewry has had millennia of experience lying and deceiving and consequently have become very shrewd and clever at fooling their own sheeple and the cattle goyim. Their all-time favorite ploy is to accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves are doing. They often talk peace like Jesus [an important Jew] but act like Jack the Ripper [another Jew]. That is why ZNN and other Jewish WMD [weapons of mass deception] are best avoided.

Nevertheless, when the joosmedia began to spread tales about Iranian President Ahmadinejad, my interest was aroused because several views attributed to him made a lot of sense. For example, the joosmedia whined that Admadinejad wanted to wipe Israel off the map. “Whow! What a great idea! An end to world history`s most vicious state terrorist government,” [I thought.] But alas a little investigation revealed that the President made no such suggestion.

He merely suggested that Palestinians be allowed to return to their villages and homes from which European Jews had ethnically cleansed them in the real Palestinian Holocaust. He further proposed that a referendum then be held in Israel in which Jews and Gentiles would vote on the type of government they wanted to have: a “Jews Only” apart-hate state or a one-man one-vote democracy. Of course, such a plebiscite might well mean that Nerutei Karta goal would be attained, i.e. the peaceful dismantling of the JewState [Teddy Herzl`s term meaning “a state of the Jews, by the Jews, and for the Jews”], but that cannot fairly be described as “wiping Israel off the map.” It is simply pointing out that Isrealhell has little if any right to be on the map.

Unfortunately, Ahmadinejad has not yet called for an international UN sponsored boycott, blockade and bombing of Israel. It is not Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Panama, or North Korea that should be bombed, but Israel.

A second idea attributed to Ahmadinejad by ZNN [Zionist News Media] is that he flat out denies that the Germans gassed, barbequed, baked, fried or sent 6,000,000 Jews up in chimney smoke. “Great, incredible! At last an important statesman is standing up to the hoaxoco$t liars and profiteers!” [I naively thought.] Imagine my disappointment after researching the matter. “Researching” here means simply reading what Ahmadinejad himself had actually said rather than what some elite joosmedia liar or some Israeli-financed translation service said that he said.

It turns out that the Iranian President is not at all a holocaust denier but simply a skeptic or supporter of revisionism. There are holocaust affirmers, revisionists, and deniers. The hoaxoco$t affirmers say, “”Thou shalt believe in the Church of the Holocaust or off to the slammer with you!” Revisionists say, “Wait a minute! There are some minor details or even major factors that have to be looked at.” [“Revision” = “re” {once again} + “vision” {look at}] Hoaxoco$t deniers say, “There is a hoax in the hoaxoco$t. The whole thing is just a filthy unfounded blood libel and should not be discussed but ridiculed.” For example, World War II revisionists do not deny that something plausibly called “World War II” happened. The want to revise it and not deny it. However, witch deniers are like Holocaust deniers. They do not simply want to refine or tweak a concept.

Actually, Ahmadinejad is closest to Norman Finkelstein because the two of them are mainly concerned about political abuses and war crimes committed in the name of the holocaust. Both are less interested in whether the holyhoax hullabaloo has any basis in historical reality. Finkelstein called the holocaust “Israel`s prize alibi” but he is a holocaust affirmer. Ahmadinejad does suggest that scientific on-the-spot forensic investigations be carried out for the first time. Who could rationally object to that? Perhaps some people fear the results of such forensic investigations?

 

But it is clear that Ahmadinejad is not up to snuff about important aspects of the holocaust narrative. For example, at a meeting in New York with the Council on Foreign Relations, he was confronted by an insurance executive who claimed that he had seen the Dachau Concentration Camp as Germany fell. Ahmadinejad reportedly asked the executive how old he was. He should have replied, “You saw Dachau? So what! Dachau is no evidence whatsoever for anything to do with the holocaust. I may have seen the Shroud of Turin but that does not prove that Jesus rose from the dead. The Resurrection of Jesus and the Holocaust of the Jews are religious beliefs. Believe what you want but do not use an Inquisition to impose your beliefs on others!”

 

A third anti-Iranian smear being foisted on Ahmadinejad is the ridiculous claim that he mocks the memory of holocaust victims, survivors, believers, whatever. However, it is impossible to mock the memory of people who could not have died in a purely fictional mass murder. It is very possible and even praiseworthy to mock the defective memory of pilfering, profiteering liars.

 

A fourth Jewish lie encountered in the media is not anti-Iranian at all. One meets it among leftish Jews who even seem to vigorously oppose the war mongering dragging us into an attack on Iran. But these Jews never point to Israel or America`s Jewish fifth column as the driving forces behind the coming war against Iran. Just as these comic book Marxists or fake anarchists blamed the 15-year long massacre of the Iraqi people on “big oil,” American capitalism, or a faceless military-industrial complex, they now blame the expansion of Israel`s anti-Islamic war on amorphous institutions and mostly unnamed individuals. The most shameless and culpable of these Jewish deceivers is probably Numb Chumsky, although readers could nominate other candidates.

 

A recent piece by Stephen Gowans is a good example of Jewish attempts at damage control. Gowans writes,

a.) “It’s true that Iran’s developing an independent nuclear power industry would furnish the country with the potential to develop nuclear weapons, but this amounts to nothing more than a defensive threat to a small class of financiers, high-level executives and corporate lawyers whose common interests lead them to rally around the idea that Iranian oil should be under US control and made available to the project of enlarging the capital of US oil companies.”

 

b.) “Today, US oil companies have no presence in Iran. Major sectors of the economy, including oil, telecommunications, transportation, as well as banking and finance, are in state hands, as prescribed by the country’s constitution.”

 

c.) “It is a threat to the minority of owners and high-level executives in the US who look to Iran, and particularly its oil, as a field for profit-making opportunities, and who, moreover, are perfectly willing to throw young, working class kids, into the service of securing it for them through the sacrifice of their bodies and lives if necessary. But the prospects for success against a nuclear-armed Iran are not what the prospects for success were in invading an effectively disarmed Iraq, and that venture has proved to be a disaster for the US capitalist class.”

 

However, Gowans makes a very interesting comment and concession in his final paragraph where he writes, “Iran poses no threat, either to the US or Israel, other than the threat of potential self-defense. The claims that the country’s leadership mocks the Holocaust and seeks nuclear weapons to carry out a genocide against Jews is pure nonsense, concocted, like the mythical stories of Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, to justify another conquest of an economically nationalist oil-rich state.”

 

This crucial final conclusion gives Gowans` game away and shows him to be nothing but a Jewish shill. He mentions here:

 

1. a threat to Israel,

 

2. mocking the holocaust, and

 

3. a genocide against the Jews as “nonsense concocted” to justify the coming war.

 

Now let us correlate the three items of nonsense concocted to justify the war with three institutions that Gowans says are driving us to war. The nonsense concocted consists of three Jewish issues. But Gowans never mentions Jews among the big players behind the drive to war. Does “big oil” gives a rat`s rectum about mocking the holocaust? Do American capitalists give two hoots about the JewState? Is the American military-industrial complex worried about genocide against the Jews?

 

Gowans is quite correct in dismissing the phony Jewish concerns as “concocted nonsense,” but why does he not point to the obvious fact that the concocters and promoters of this nonsense are all -or largely- Jews.
 

Many Gentiles privately mock the holocaust, would love to see the JewState bulldozed into the Mediterranean, and worry about genocides committed BY Jews and not at all about genocides AGAINST Jews. The only people worried about genocides against Jews are skillful fundraisers at the ADL [American Defamation League] and hucksters at Hoaxoco$t museums.

 

It looks more and more as if:

 

1.      Israel will once again use nuclear blackmail against the JewAssA to force it to attack Iran [“Either the UAssA attacks Iran with conventional weapons or the JewState attacks it with nuclear weapons!], or

 

2.      Isrealhell uses a false flag operation to attack the American “sitting duck” armada now being assembled off the Iranian coast and then blames the attack on Iran, or

 

3.      the JewState will jump the gun and nuke Iran and then whine, “But, Oiy veh!, Israel has the right to defend itself.”

 

But if there is a just God in heaven or elsewhere, he has certainly provided Iran with enough top quality Russian made “firecrackers” to stuff down the smokestacks at Dimona and incinerate the terrorist JewState in its own nuclear arsenal. As a famous Jewish rabbi once said, “He who takes the sword will perish by the sword.”

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Is War with Iran the October Surprise? Polls as Prologue

By Captain Eric H. May, Ghost Troop Commander - captainmay@prodigy.net

 

According to current polls, if the mid-term elections were held today, President George W. Bush and his Republican Party would lose badly.  He would then face an opposition Congress in 2007, one bound and determined to reassert its oversight duties.  Investigations, an inevitability, could easily lead to his impeachment, and in that event the two-thirds of the United States who don't trust him could ask troubling questions about his presidency, all the way back to the still-murky events of 9/11.

 

If they're up to their duty, a new Congress could impeach him as a man who was brought to power by a war cabal for the sole purpose of starting a war in the Middle East.  They could say that his allegiances are not -- and never were -- to the American People.  Rather, he has been bought and paid for by the Oil Lobby, the Military-Industrial Lobby and the Israel Lobby.

 

An American Armada

 

As I write, the U.S. Navy's Second Fleet has dispatched the aircraft carrier Eisenhower, attended by a strike group of subordinate ships, from its Norfolk home to the Persian Gulf, where it is due to arrive on Oct. 21.  The strike group will link up with other pre-positioned military assets, and could easily start a war with Iran, making it part of the ultimate October Surprise.

 

Officers from the Eisenhower have reached out to the government, military and media ever since the orders came, protesting that they don't want to be used to initiate a war with Iran.  They assert that this is against their service oath to the Constitution, which clearly states that only the Congress -- not the president -- can start a war.  Their distress signal has reached official circles, thanks to a September article by The Nation magazine.  It's a confirmation of a New Yorker story in the spring, by Seymour Hersh, alleging that the Pentagon was then putting the brakes on a Bush administration itching for a war with Iran.

 

Congress pretends not to notice what is happening, though, either too scared, too involved or too implicated to do its duty.  It shamelessly gave away its authorization to an Iraq War in 2002, six months before Bush began the attack, and hasn't said a word against what may be the preparation for an Iran War in 2006.  It's been many months since I've heard Congress say it doesn't think Bush has the right to start a new war -- and that means it thinks he does.

 

False Flags and False Friends

 

A false flag attack is one in which you or your war partners attack your own forces while pretending to be someone else -- then blame it on that someone else.  As a lifelong soldier and military historian, it seems quite possible to me a false flag attack on a U.S. ship in the Persian Gulf could be planned soon to alter the upcoming U.S. elections.  It would be blamed on Iran, of course.  

 

The U.S. has often gone to war after Navy incidents that were dubious at best, and false flag at worst.  The Spanish-American War began after the U.S.S. Maine conveniently blew up as it lay anchored in Havana Harbor, where a jingoistic U.S. government had sent it as a provocation to a senile Spain that was trying to put down a Cuban revolution.  Our government immediately called the explosion an attack, and blamed it on Spain, against whom we afterward declared a patriotic imperial war.  Decades later we admitted to Spain that we knew they had not attacked us.  The explosion was officially called an "accident" -- but just how accidental was it?

 

More and more evidence says that in the months before World War II, the Navy and White House worked together to allow the Pearl Harbor attack their own officers saw coming, the better to rouse the public for what was to come.  Have the same powerful officials decided that a Persian Gulf Pearl Harbor is what we must suffer to start World War III?

 

If we don't want to do the unsavory job of a performing a false flag attack on ourselves, we can always count on Israel to do anything necessary to keep us fighting against their Middle Eastern enemies.  In 1967, they launched an unsuccessful day-long assault against our U.S.S. Liberty, then sailing well outside its territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean.  They intended to scuttle the ship, kill its survivors, then blame the attack on Egypt, against whom they wanted us to go to war.  Not one in a hundred Americans know about the event; both media and government have colluded to keep the fact silent.

 

The Devil's Delight

 

In the aftermath of a successful false flag attack, blamed on Iran, Bush would have an easy answer to his current political and military woes:  a new enemy.  Iran would certainly fight back against our Navy and Air Force forces over its own territory, and would probably attack Army and Marine forces in Iraq.  In both cases it could inflict heavy casualties, and thereby generate war rage in the United States.  The same cooperative media that led the American People into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 could lead it into Iran in 2006.  The United States would mobilize the economy and initiate the draft.

 

Bush could then use the war as a perfect excuse to sign the Detainee Treatment Bill -- the torture bill -- that Congress delivered to his desk two weeks ago.  Thus empowered, he could suspend civil rights -- going back to habeas corpus -- from anyone he chooses, whether they are foreigners or U.S. citizens.  That would go a long way toward silencing his domestic critics, whom he considers traitors, and who are the greatest single impediment to the world war plan he has served.

 

All this would mean an American dictatorship, of course, but Bush came into office saying he wouldn't mind one -- if he could be the dictator.  Funny, how the media never repeats the words that we really need to hear to understand who Bush really is.  Just a day ago he said that loss in Iraq would mean the loss of the Middle East, and the loss of the Middle East would mean the loss of the world's foremost strategic resource, oil, and we'd be condemned by distant posterity.  He is a man on a mission, still, and he doesn't care at all what we think of his means or ends.

 

May God protect the United States of America.

# # #

 

Captain May, a former intelligence and public affairs officer, is the founder and commander of Ghost Troop, a cyber-intelligence unit on a mission of conscience to inform the American People of the dangers of the Bush administration.  To learn more about him and Ghost Troop, refer to the article "Ghost Troop -- the Art of Info-War" in the Lone Star Iconoclast http://www.lonestaricon.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=402&z=52

______________________
 

Iran to Host Conference on Holocaust

Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, dismissing it as exaggerated.

Tue, Sep. 05, 2006 Posted: 19:11:04 PM EST

 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, dismissing it as exaggerated.

 

The decision came as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan raised concerns with Iranian officials over an exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust in Iran's capital, Tehran.

 

Hard-line President Ahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Nazis' slaughter of 6 million Jews a myth and said Israel should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States. His remarks prompted a global outpouring of condemnation.

 

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said both opponents and proponents of the existence of the Holocaust could participate in the conference.

 

"God willing, a conference on the Holocaust will be held in the autumn. The Holocaust is not a sacred issue that one can't touch," he told reporters. "I have visited the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe. I think it is exaggerated."

 

Asefi did not disclose where the Holocaust conference would be held, nor who would attend. Iran first raised the possibility of the conference in January.

 

Annan brought up the exhibit, which opened in response to Muslim outrage over the Prophet Muhammad caricatures, in talks Saturday with Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, said Annan's spokesman Ahmad Fawzi.

 

Annan told Mottaki "we should avoid anything that incites hatred" according to Fawzi.

 

The Holocaust cartoon exhibit opened last month at Tehran's Caricature House, with 204 entries from Iran and abroad.

 

The cartoons were submitted after the exhibit's co-sponsor, the Hamshahri newspaper, said it wanted to test the West's tolerance for drawings about the Nazis' mass murder of European Jews during World War II. The entries on display came from nations including United States, Indonesia and Turkey.

 

Israel considers Iran a threat and has refused to rule out military force to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Iran has said its nuclear program is intended only to generate electricity, but Western countries suspect the country is trying to build an atomic bomb.

 

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

_______________________________

Robert FAURISSON

Benedict XVI Denounces the Absence of “Reason” among the Moslems 

23 September 2006

The speech given by Pope Benedict XVI on September 12 at the University of Ratisbon (Regensburg) has caused quite a fuss, but how many of those who have commented on it have read it in its original German version and in its entirety? One may well fear that the partial translations readers have been able to consult in the French press will not enable them to form an exact idea of it; as for the translation, said to be complete, that Le Monde made available on the Internet, the first words and some brief fragments elsewhere in the speech are missing.

Pronounced in German, the speech bears the title “Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections”. It can be found on the Vatican’s website under copyright of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana *. Taking the podium in the great lecture hall (Aula Magna) of the University in question, the Pope spoke to a select audience. His first words were “Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen”; among those “Magnificences” was the University’s chancellor. The orator, addressing himself to a gathering made up for the most part of academics and scientists, dotted his talk throughout with Greek and Latin phrases. The substance and tone of his statements were those of a theology professor inclined to pedantry and, at times, obscure. An examination of the vocabulary allows one to make some surprising observations. The first of these is the frequency with which a certain word came to this theologian, who made a vibrant defence of it: the word “reason” (Vernunft), repeated about forty times in a text of six pages! The second is the frequency with which this representative of a religion said to be universal employed words that give the impression that Greece, Rome and Europe are the centre of the world: all by themselves, the words evoking Greek, Hellenic or Socratic thought appeared about thirty times! The speaker’s guiding idea was that the Roman Catholic religion is the only one where faith and reason are ideally joined: “biblical faith” (the Jewish Old Testament and the New Testament) and “Greek questioning”. It is, according to him, to Greece that this religion is indebted for having brought it the so precious asset of the “logos” (reason). Such a heritage of biblical and Greek riches, such a treasure of faith and reason united are to be preserved in the face of all the heresies or reformist, modernist, scientistic or irrational driftings that the Roman Catholic Church may have experienced in the past and by which it is threatened today.

But, in contrast, the Moslem religion is, for its part, described as being deprived of a whole important segment of that treasure, for it lacks “reason”, also called the “logos”.

An Attack on the Moslem Religion, Addressed to a Persian

In the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of his speech, the Pope plainly lays his cards on the table. He cites an “erudite Byzantine emperor” of the Christian faith, Manuel II Paleologus, who, towards the end of the 14th century, in a controversy with an “educated Persian” of the Moslem faith, apparently demonstrated the superiority of his religion to that of his interlocutor, for in the Christians’ conception of God there is room for reason whereas with Mohammed there is no reason. Here, in their entirety, are those two introductory paragraphs:

I was reminded of all this [concerning the University where I used to teach] recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both [religions]. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting [sic: the German text has fasziniert (fascinate), a decidedly stronger word] and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (dialeciV [dialexis, controversy]) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war [Jihad]. The emperor must have known that sura 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" [Jews and Christians] and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (sun logo [sun logo, with reason])  is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

A Confirmed and Insistent Attack

Supposing that this controversy did indeed take place and that the learned Persian really existed, it is easy to imagine what the latter might have retorted to the Emperor on the subject, for example, of the Crusades and the Inquisition as far as the propagation of faith by violence was concerned. In this respect it is surprising that Benedict XVI, wondering about “Faith and Reason”, should not have made the least allusion in all his talk to certain dark pages of Christian or papal history. He declares himself to be “fascinated” by the Christian Emperor’s reflections on the Jihad, a word understood here in its sense of “holy war”. He is so “fascinated” that he has decided to choose this imperial and Christian reflection as the starting point of his talk. Thus for him this is not a matter of a mere detail or a remark made by the way. When he specifies that the Emperor “addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded”, he is not voicing any reservation on the merits of the ideas but rather slipping in a comment on the form, that is, on the harsh frankness of the time. Manuel II’s words “fascinate” him to such an extent that, in the whole of his speech, he names the Emperor (der Kaiser) ten times, including a first mention in his introduction and a final one in his conclusion. In the paragraph following the two paragraphs reproduced above, he declares:

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident.

By way of contrast, the Pope names a Moslem author, Ibn Hazm, for whom the divine absolute is such that God could, if he wished, do without reason altogether, even choose not to be bound by his own word and so refrain from revealing the truth to us. Then the Pope returns to that Kaiser, so close to his heart, and quotes him anew on the subject of God who, according to the Christian conception, “acts sun logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word.” In the sixth paragraph, he again attacks Ibn Hazm and the latter’s conception of a God whose “transcendence and otherness are so exalted”. At the very end of his speech, it is in the following terms that he brings up the Emperor one last time:

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

An Attack arising from Obscure Motives

Thus the Pope wishes to see a “dialogue of cultures”, including the Islamic culture, but, as may be seen, he does so under the invocation, in a way, of a Christian Emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, for whom the religion of Mohammed is nonsensical. Besides, that dialogue is apparently to be held on a plane of faith and reason but in line with the Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of these. The Pope gives an impression here of speaking with the authority of the inviting power. To finish, that day in Ratisbon he called on the university, the scientists and professors to collaborate with him in promoting a narrowly defined type of “dialogue of cultures”.

Emperor Manuel II, in the late 14^th century, addressed that kind of message, in a brusque tone, to a Persian of the Moslem faith. Pope Benedict XVI, for his part, at the dawn of the 21^st century, has addressed, in a different tone, the same message to the whole world but not without targeting in particular the Moslem world and, perhaps, even more particularly, the Persia or Iran of today.

One may wonder what motives and which counsellors were able to push him to develop such a lecture to the attention of the whole world before a German university. Did he seriously think that the Moslem world would accept to hear and receive his lesson without making vigorous protests?

A part of the Moslem world has reacted with fury, thus giving the impression of religious fanaticism. At their end, the attitude of many Westerners has betrayed consternation or embarrassment. On the other hand, a fair number of Jews have been unable to hide their satisfaction before going to the aid of the Pope upon seeing the Moslem authorities and crowds vilify him. Up to this time Benedict XVI had never ceased, with a thoroughly German submission, making reassuring gestures towards the Jews but, going about it rather awkwardly, he had displeased them. In particular, during his visit to Auschwitz, he thought he would be doing his duty to Jewish memory properly by laying the blame for “the crime” of the Shoah on a “group of criminals”; he was mistaken: the Jews did not see things that way, since for them it is the German people in their entirety who must have the mark of Cain branded on them. In short, this Pope seems given to making statements which subsequently oblige him, first, to deplore the fact that his intentions have been incorrectly grasped, then second, to voice regrets for the “misunderstandings” thus created. That said, one very moderate reaction to his speech and to the showings of anger that ensued is worth noting: that of a Persian, an Iranian, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is that of a particularly subtle mind that the Western media like to describe as fanatical. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recommended coolness and calm to all concerned.

One Possible Explanation

Personally, I have sought above all to know exactly what the Pope said in his Ratisbon address. Having read the text, my general conclusion is that he was indulging in a sort of open lecture on theology, philosophy and morality aimed mainly at the world’s Moslems. Therefore I think that the media are right when, in their severe summings-up of the Pope’s statements, they stress the sentence where Manuel II Paleologus attacked the religion of Mohammed in a frank and brusque manner: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” But, as for knowing why the Pope attacked the Moslem religion in this way, I note that the commentators I have had occasion to read or hear have either not asked themselves the question or have failed to provide a clear answer. Calling Benedict XVI a “blunderer” hardly helps us understand why it was that this specific “blunder” and not some other was committed.

Perhaps his ill-advised assault on the Moslem religion came from the old man’s anguish at noting in Europe, the cradle of Christianity, the collapse of Christian observance and the rise of Moslem observance. It may be that he fears for a future where he sees that conflict of civilisations, cultures and religions of which certain people speak these days, and so imagines that the main danger comes from the poor of the East rather than from an exceedingly heavily armed West and the colonial Jewish State established in Palestine. He might finally harbour a weakness for political conservatism, even neo-conservatism of the Jewish-American fashion. Nothing of all this can be ruled out but perhaps also — and this will be my own hypothesis — the cause is to be sought in a distant past when the young German Josef Ratzinger wore, unwillingly, he tells us, the uniform of the Hitler Youth. For more than sixty years, burnt by that tunic of Nessos, he has felt, like any German, overwhelmed by the mortal sin that his country, it is alleged, committed, that of the alleged genocide of the Jews. His predecessors John XXIII, Paul VI and especially John Paul II piled up all possible forms of allegiance to the Jews, even the most preposterous. John Paul II went so far as to make of Auschwitz a new Calvary. At the Jews’ request he chased the Catholic nuns out of the new Calvary and had the Christian crosses removed. He canonised Edith Stein and, for the occasion, dared to state in his homily that the saint had met her death in a “gas chamber”. It is in this atmosphere of penitence and of sickly repentance that J. Ratzinger has himself laboured at the Vatican in the shadow of his predecessors. Elected Pope in his turn, he was not about to break with precedent. On the contrary, now that the whole world was to know of his past membership in the diabolical Hitler Youth organisation, he had imperatively to carry still further his allegiance to the people describing itself as the whole world’s martyr par excellence. Benedict XVI is among those who “pray for peace in the Middle East” but who do so whilst placing the Jewish coloniser and the colonised Palestinian, whether Moslem or Christian, on the same level. In his eyes, the Jewish Army and the Jewish State do not appear to bear any particular responsibility in the catastrophic situation in the Near and Middle East. Thus there remain those fanaticised Moslems, impervious to reason, to the “logos” of the Greeks, Europe and the West, and they are that way in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon as well as in a lot of other Islamic countries and, perhaps especially, in Iran. As he sees it, the right thing to do is to bring these poor people to reason.

It is perhaps here that the German Pope’s bottom purpose lies: to ingratiate himself with the Jews by denouncing Moslem fanaticism. But J. Ratzinger went about it too naïvely, too clumsily. Overbidding did not pay off and the venture failed. Today some Jewish intellectuals are going so far as to find fault with him for it. Tomorrow, when he has to calm the storm, he will explain to us that he did not say… what he, nonetheless, did actually say.

Additional note on Benedict XVI and the Old Testament:

If there exists a work in which calls often arise for hatred, vengeance and the physical extermination of entire peoples (men, women, children, including the aged and the infants, not to mention herds of livestock), it is indeed the Bible of the Jews, that Old Testament mentioned eulogistically by Benedict XVI. According to Isaiah (13, 15-16, 18), Babylon shall be punished: “Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished… [The Jews] shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb”. According to Hosea (13, 16), “Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up”. According to Nahum (3, 6, 10), “I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock. […]Yet was she [Nineva] carried away, she went into captivity: her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets”. According to Psalm 137, David, addressing the land of Edom, declares: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” According to the First Book of Samuel (18, 25, 27), King Saul will give David the hand of his daughter Michal on condition that David bring him “a hundred foreskins of the Philistines [Palestinians], to be avenged of the king's enemies”; David and his men “slew of the Philistines [Palestinians] two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale [tally] to the king.” As for the Book of Esther, it relates the “joy and gladness” felt by the Jews in exacting revenge. Thanks to the intrigues of Esther and Mordecai in the court of Ahasuerus (Xerxes), King of the Persians (Iranians), Haman is hanged and all his property conveyed to Esther, who puts Mordecai in charge thereof; Mordecai subsequently takes Haman’s place “next unto king Ahasuerus”. Then Esther and Mordecai also obtain permission for the Jews to slaughter all their enemies: “And in every province, and in every city, whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them [like the hood upon the head of a man sentenced to hang]” (8, 17). These are the days of Purim, plural of Pur, “that is, the lot [cast]” (Esther 9, 24), signifying “destiny”. The ten sons of Haman are in turn hanged as well. The Jews kill at least 75,300 Persians. And so it is that, still in the 21^st century, every year the Jews, exchanging gifts, joyously celebrate Purim. One could go on citing quite a few other pages of the Bible where an invitation to murder or mass slaughter is expressed. As for the Talmud, it evokes a Jesus Christ condemned forever to boil in excrement. On this last point one may consult Der Babylonische Talmud [Gittin, V, VI, Fol. 57], neu übertagen durch Lazarus Goldschmidt, Berlin, Jüdischer Verlag, 1932, p. 368, where the expression is: “mit siedendem Kote”. One may also refer to The Babylonian Talmud [Seder Nashim, Gittin, Fol. 57] under the editorship of Rabbi Dr I. Epstein, London, The Soncino Press, 1936, p. 260-261, where the expression employed is “with boiling hot excrement”. The cult of violence in Jewish religious tradition and practice has been the subject of numerous publications by Jewish and non-Jewish authors. One of the latest to address it is Elliot Horowitz in his book entitled Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton University Press, May 2006, 344 p.). Some Jews are uneasy at seeing “the people of the Book” ritually celebrate those orgies of vengeance as they do.

It is with this “people of the Book” that the Palestinians currently have to deal. It would be good to hear the Pope, now so preoccupied with Moslem violence, speak on that score.

* The official English translation may be consulted at

 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html; for the original German text, same address but with “ge.” in the place of “en.”, before “html”.

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Israeli diplomat to answer racist claim

Ross Peake

Canberra Times, Tuesday, 17 October 2006

Israel's ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, has been ordered to Tel Aviv to respond to allegations he referred to Asians as "the yellow race". Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said reports of Mr Tamir's recall were disturbing.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said the reported comments were "completely unacceptable". And a spokesman for New Zealand's United Asian Association, Ken Yee, said the remarks left him speechless. "The days of the yellow peril and calling us slant-eyes are long gone," he said.

Mr Tamir arrived in Israel late yesterday and is expected to be grilled today at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs over the alleged racist remarks. Mr Tamir denies making the comments attributed to him in an Israeli newspaper, according to the embassy in Canberra. He was believed to have been in Singapore on Friday on his way to Australia after a short holiday in Israel, when he was recalled immediately.

 

In an interview with the widely circulated daily, Haaretz, last week, Mr Tamir allegedly said Israel and Australia had to cooperate because they were like sisters in Asia. "We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians, we don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race, Australia and Israel are not - we are basically the white race," he was quoted as saying.

 

In Tel Aviv, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement about the need to clarify the matter. "If the article is accurate, this is a grave and unacceptable remark," the ministry said. On Sunday, Mr Tamir issued a statement of denial in another Israeli newspaper, Ma'ariv.

 

In Canberra, the embassy said that a professional investigation into the alleged remarks would begin today.

Mr Henderson said that the practices to be implemented at the ABC were normal risk-management practice in an attempt to "anticipate problems", he said. He also said that most news media implemented this risk management, although "maybe not at The Canberra Times or the Melbourne Age".

 

"The ABC will be a substantially improved organisation," he said. The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, told reporters in Canberra yesterday that he would not tell the management of the ABC how to run its operations. "The ABC is independent, it's funded by the Government ... I have expressed concerns about certain things relating to the ABC and I reserve the right to do so in the future, but I'm not going to start giving any public advice to the ABC at the moment regarding this."

 

Morning announcer for ABC local radio in Sydney and formerly in Melbourne, Virginia Trioli, said that she believed the new proposals would make no difference to employees of the ABC. "It seems to be a mandate to keep doing what we are doing," she said. "This is what we are in the business of doing, finding new voices every single day." She also said that the new director of editorial policies would function as an ombudsman. "I think every [media organisation] should have one," she said. The position of director of editorial policies will be advertised both internally at the ABC and externally.

http://www.canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id=517346&class=News%2D+General

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The Return of the Death Squads, May 5, 2006, by John Pilger

…Now that Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian violence" and "civil war," the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream," is that the "Salvador Option" has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the U.S., which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the breakup of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration...